Sunforger and Burst Lightning

Welcome back for another installment of Rules Tips! Hopefully everyone continues to enjoy drafting Modern Masters 2015. We’ve come across a number of situations that piqued our interest and certainly yours. Let’s jump right in with the use of Sunforger into Burst Lighting. A great way to remember how cards work is to understand the rules. First let’s cover some terms:Burst Lightning has an additional cost, which doesn’t change the converted mana cost (also known by the abbreviation of “CMC”) of the spell. If you ever want to determine what a card’s CMC is, all you have to do is look in the top right hand corner. This means a card costing RRR has a CMC of 3, 3R has a CMC of 4 and so on (save for spells with X in the cost, but we’ll cover that momentarily). Now that we know that bit of information, it should be easy to determine what we can do with Burst Lightning during the activation of Sunforger’s first activated ability. Since Burst Lightning has a CMC of one, it is a legal choice for Sunforger and we are able to pay the additional cost for the effect (because Sunforger only covers the ‘base’ cost- any additional costs you actually have to pay!). Since we’re on the subject, is Comet Storm a legal choice for Sunforger? Absolutely! Everywhere but the stack, X is considered to be 0. That means that in your library, Comet Storm’s CMC is 2, so Sunforger can find it. UNFORTUNATELY, if you’re casting an X spell without paying the mana cost, X must be 0, so you probably don’t want to find Comet Storm.
Hope you enjoyed today’s tip!